Two decades ago, I crossed the United States by train for the first time. I left Portland, Oregon, and the gloomy shadow of my first break-up with my first American girlfriend, went up to Seattle, then crossed a restorative, fluffy-cloud-filled Big Sky to the plains of North Dakota and Minnesota and Wisconsin, where we were briefly halted by a cow on the track. The Empire Builder dropped me at Chicago, then it was on to New York, Boston and the plane that would take me back, unwillingly, to London. The hours flew.

But here's the thing I remember above all about that trip: I wrote like a goddamn demon. In about 4 days, I filled four-and-a-half notebooks with my favorite fountain pen and cartridges of purple ink. (Hey, I was 20.) Not much of the actual writing is worth mentioning. It's more that the sheer prolific variety of it astonished me: letters home; ill-advised letters to my ex; fiction and non-fiction; short stories and shaggy-dog stories; proposals and extracts; journaling; therapy; travelogue; prose poems from the observation car.

So naturally I was thrilled to find out that Amtrak has launched a Writers in Residency program for up to 24 people, awarded on a rolling basis (ha ha, Amtrak). It's all thanks to a series of tweets from writing-on-trains fans (you can read about Jessica Gross, the freelance writer who started the ball rolling on Twitter, here) and the hard work of Amtrak's supremely smart and talented social media team.

What's that? Yes, of course I've filed my application for the program. More than 5,000 writers have, according to Amtrak. The only question is, why haven't you? Click here to fill it out; Amtrak accepts both emerging and established writers.

To this day, whenever I feel the creeping stagnation of writer's block, I think of that train journey. The simple act of being on a train broke through all the excuses we usually construct for why we're not writing. For four days, I was infected with hypergraphia. I couldn't afford a sleeper, but it didn't matter. I stayed up late in the dining car, scribbling faster than my new drunken friends could drink.

Whichever lucky souls get these Chocolate Factory-style golden tickets between now and March 2015, they're going to have the time of their writing lives. They get to go wherever they want for five days, and the sleeper car is paid for, though I can recommend writing in the dining car at night. I also recommend you ditch the technology as much as possible, skip the free wifi, and pack a bag full of blank notebooks. When was the last time you wrote longhand, and could suddenly bust out a sketch of a cloud that happens to look rather like your ex's nose?

This is the paragraph in which I'm supposed to be skeptical about the program, and I suppose some writers might be irked by the fact that Amtrak reserves the right to use whatever you put in your application in future promotional material. Privacy, they may cry. Fine; let them. More golden tickets for the rest of us. Amtrak states it doesn't have any right to whatever you're writing on the train, so what's the problem?

This is one of those rare ideas where not a single bad aspect can be found. Amtrak is in desperate need of exposure and the funding that usually comes with it. It needs a bigger budget to run more train lines and less bus lines. From a global perspective, America, your passenger train lines are a your most lamentably underfunded national treasure. Even British Rail is run better, and that's saying something. Let's not pretend either are a patch on the Japanese bullet trains or Deutsche Bahn.

For a trained historian, which is what I was at 20, the evident lack of care for an essential legacy — the way Amtrak can often be a little too slow and frayed around the edges for many potential passengers — was blood-boiling. My countryman George Stephenson may have invented trains, but it was your country that really invented train travel as we know it today. And train travel invented and defined the American entrepreneur, for good and ill. I could hear the ghosts of gilded eras, the clinking of glasses from more numerous and more stylish passengers, in that dining car at night.

It was the lifeblood of your economy, and still is, in a sense — 43% of your freight goes by rail, which is the highest percentage in the world, and that number is still growing. The infrastructure is there. So why don't 43% of Americans travel by rail, at least once a year? Why isn't hitting the tracks anywhere close to Vegas or Disneyland as a popular vacation option?

Amtrak ridership is at a record high of 32 million customers per annum — which sounds great, until you consider that it represents just over 10% of the population.

The road to fixing that is going to be a long one. Just look at how long it's taking to get high-speed rail in California, let alone the fabled Hyperloop. Congress would take an awful lot of convincing to fund globally-competitive high-speed rail on a national scale, but convincing any group of people of anything at speed starts these days with social media.

It starts, perhaps, with 24 plugged-in writers unplugging from the intoxication of Twitter, and remembering the sense of scale and proportion you get from all those purple mountains and amber waves of grain — up close, the way you see it via no other mode of transport. Perhaps one of them can explain eloquently, in a Facebook post that goes viral, that travel isn't all about TSA pat-downs or achingly long drives.

I will share one story from those 1994 Amtrak notebooks. One evening I went to the dining car and ate opposite a vacationing couple. The husband turned out to have a story as fascinating, historically, as the Empire Builder train we were riding. He'd been a staff driver for a bigwig American Colonel during World War II in England. Exactly 50 years earlier, in July 1944, after D-Day, he went to Normandy with bulldozers — who knew they used bulldozers? — to clear the hard-fought beaches of honored dead.

Disquieted by that thought, I went back to my seat and speed-wrote a poem called "The Colonel's Driver." Don't worry, I won't bore you with it, but suffice to say I was moved by the contrast between that nightmarish transport of five decades previously and the more civilized train car we met in. We drive in war, in anger, in fulfilling our duties. In peace, on vacation, when we want to find ourselves and connect with our past, we take the train.

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